The disclosed system relates generally to automated systems for traffic violation enforcement, and more specifically to a system for integrating digital video recordings of potential traffic violations with a vehicle information database, as may be provided by department of motor vehicles (DMV) vehicle registration database, in order to generate traffic citations.
Traffic violation enforcement in general, including generation of citations and court date scheduling, is a costly, resource intensive endeavor. Police departments facing budget restrictions have been hard pressed to allocate sufficient officers and other personal to perform the related tasks of traffic intersection monitoring, traffic citation generation, and court date scheduling.
In recent years, attempts have been made to automate traffic light violation enforcement. Existing systems have included fixed position cameras for taking still photographs of potential violation events, and vehicle detectors located in proximity to a monitored intersection. However, such systems have included no mechanism with which a citation could be conveniently generated using automatically collected information regarding the alleged violation, in combination with vehicle information from a database. Accordingly, citation generation and court date scheduling have involved much costly and time consuming manual processing.
For the above reasons it would be desirable to have an automated traffic light violation citation generator and court date scheduling system, which provides convenient access to information regarding the violation event, as well as to vehicle information from a vehicle database. The system should further be secure with regard to protecting the privacy of persons involved in events which are determined to be non-violations.